The LORD will smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore boil, whereof thou canst not be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the crown of thy head.

Everybody has a favourite part of the bible. My favourite part is when God issues a slate of horrible curses.

Deuteronomy Chapter 28:15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee.

Here comes some fun. Let us imbibe each curse and enjoy! Remember that this is a God concept that will harm you if you don’t do what It tells you to. I am not sure how that it fits in with modern motivational theory, but it sure is scary. When something is scary like this you either fall in line like an obedient slave or you run hard in the other direction. Another thing you might do is dismiss it all as pure nonsense.

16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the young of thy flock. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
20 The LORD will send upon thee cursing, discomfiture, and rebuke, in all that thou puttest thy hand unto to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the evil of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken Me. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
21 The LORD will make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until He have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest in to possess it. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
22 The LORD will smite thee with consumption, and with fever, and with inflammation, and with fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
24 The LORD will make the rain of thy land powder and dust; from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
25 The LORD will cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies; thou shalt go out one way against them, and shalt flee seven ways before them; and thou shalt be a horror unto all the kingdoms of the earth. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
26 And thy carcasses shall be food unto all fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and there shall be none to frighten them away. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
27 The LORD will smite thee with the boil of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
28 The LORD will smite thee with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of heart. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not make thy ways prosperous; and thou shalt be only oppressed and robbed alway, and there shall be none to save thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her; thou shalt build a house, and thou shalt not dwell therein; thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not use the fruit thereof. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof; thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee; thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies; and thou shalt have none to save thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day; and there shall be nought in the power of thy hand. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed away. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
34 so that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
35 The LORD will smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore boil, whereof thou canst not be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the crown of thy head. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
36 The LORD will bring thee, and thy king whom thou shalt set over thee, unto a nation that thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all the peoples whither the LORD shall lead thee away. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
38 Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather little in; for the locust shall consume it. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
39 Thou shalt plant vineyards and dress them, but thou shalt neither drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worm shall eat them. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
40 Thou shalt have olive-trees throughout all thy borders, but thou shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olives shall drop off. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
41 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be thine; for they shall go into captivity. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
42 All thy trees and the fruit of thy land shall the locust possess. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
43 The stranger that is in the midst of thee shall mount up above thee higher and higher; and thou shalt come down lower and lower. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
44 He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him; he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
45 And all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou didst not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
46 And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
47 because thou didst not serve the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, by reason of the abundance of all things.
48 therefore shalt thou serve thine enemy whom the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things; and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
49 The LORD will bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as the vulture swoopeth down; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
50 a nation of fierce countenance, that shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy ground, until thou be destroyed; that also shall not leave thee corn, wine, or oil, the increase of thy kine, or the young of thy flock, until he have caused thee to perish. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fortified walls come down, wherein thou didst trust, throughout all thy land; and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy land, which the LORD thy God hath given thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters whom the LORD thy God hath given thee; in the siege and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall straiten thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
54 The man that is tender among you, and very delicate, his eye shall be evil against his brother, and against the wife of his bosom, and against the remnant of his children whom he hath remaining. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
55 so that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat, because he hath nothing left him; in the siege and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall straiten thee in all thy gates. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
56 The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness and tenderness, her eye shall be evil against the husband of her bosom, and against her son, and against her daughter. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
57 and against her afterbirth that cometh out from between her feet, and against her children whom she shall bear; for she shall eat them for want of all things secretly; in the siege and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall straiten thee in thy gates. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
58 If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and awful Name, the LORD thy God; (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
59 then the LORD will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
60 And He will bring back upon thee all the diseases of Egypt, which thou wast in dread of; and they shall cleave unto thee. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou be destroyed. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
62 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude; because thou didst not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
63 And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to cause you to perish, and to destroy you; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest in to possess it. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
64 And the LORD shall scatter thee among all peoples, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers, even wood and stone. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
65 And among these nations shalt thou have no repose, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot; but the LORD shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and languishing of soul. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
66 And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no assurance of thy life. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
67 In the morning thou shalt say: ‘Would it were even!’ and at even thou shalt say: ‘Would it were morning!’ for the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
68 And the LORD shall bring thee back into Egypt in ships, by the way whereof I said unto thee: ‘Thou shalt see it no more again’; and there ye shall sell yourselves unto your enemies for bondmen and for bondwoman, and no man shall buy you. (because you didn’t do what I told you to)
69 These are the words of the covenant which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside the covenant which He made with them in Horeb. Have a WONDERFUL DAY!

We have spoken of mud and in an upcoming post we shall be addressing racial categories. At this time the writing involves reporting on these things.

We will speak about the National Basketball Association and the secret white supremacists of Belleville. What a great time to be alive.

Sitting alone or with friends, one cannot deny that thirst to express. The expression of writing. That is what we are writing about. Mud.

Here is a link to Aish HaTorah and one to the Seventh Day Adventists. Check these sites out. They are fab!

By the way, a Seventh Day Adventist named Kelly told me about how cruel God was to those that do not follow his orders. She described Hell in graphic detail. I was 5 years old. It was cool because it happened according to God’s will. I am still freaked out about it 45 years later!

Eating the strange mud

Rabbi Rabinovich and Rose Rabbinovich propose new design argument

This post is accompanied by the brilliant music of Toronto’s Mike Kane:

Disassembled_mix

This post may be difficult to understand but if you allow yourself to be comfortable and relaxed you will easily comprehend it. The story is in my fingertips and your eye and mental energy are huddling down to understand the message. You are already doing a beautiful job. You are in a state of ease, like Mexico after lunch.

The cause of war, thankfully God is funny

The first thing to “get” is the level of satisfaction that you can have from just being with yourself as you watch Duck Soup by the Marx Brothers. The war is on due to a verbal misunderstanding and ego. Thank God it is funny.

A sock lost is a sock gained

The second thing to “get” is that the sock you mysteriously lose in the laundry is not actually a sock lost but rather a sock gained. This may sound odd at first since we are trained to see it as a missing sock, our entire sock collection minus 1 left foot sock or 1 right foot sock. But I am proposing that we are actually gaining one half of a pair of socks and thinking that we are missing its match and that therefore we are in a state of loss. Since we tend to be superstitions about missing socks we may as well entertain the idea that we are mysteriously gaining 1 sock that happens to be missing its mate.

This is not so difficult a concept really but some have responded with bewilderment. So I try and find new ways of explaining it.

A friend of mine, who “got” it right away, suggested a way that this point of view could lead to world peace and the spread of human rights. I think this is doable (perhaps through a facebook group – that always changes the world) but the level of attention and prerequisite knowledge is beyond the scope of this blog post.

Is it enough to say he is handsome?

Let us assume that Rabbi Rabinovich is a handsome man and let us assume that Rose Rabbinovich is enamored of the Rabbi. Is it enough to tell the Rabbi that he is handsome? Is there a chance for Rose to have a relationship with the Rabbi?

Asian Carp are big, ugly and ravenous.

Hope you enjoy this meditation and yoga video.

Watch for the addition of an exciting Design Argument outreach Rabbinical staff member coming very soon. This Rabbi will lead us into the great future that we are embarking upon. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

Contrary to the claims of Richard Dawkins, self-promoting atheist and heathen worshiper of the gnarly cucumber, God does exist. This has been proven beyond a doubt through many peer reviewed trials. I wish these nasty atheists would read the literature.

But there remains a problem, which I am sure the more sensitive among you will have noticed. God is very distracted. She has been distracted since just after the very beginning. If I were to venture a guess I would conclude that God is highly distractive with marked mood swings. She starts things and often destroys them when She gets frustrated. Although She is purportedly omniscient (according to Her psycho-vocational testing results), She persistently does not use the full range of Her abilities. She also seems to disappear for decades or centuries at a time. When evil reigns She always blames others for this which points to a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She has many defenders who constantly bleat about the need for evil in order for free will to exist. We can ignore this falsehood for the purpose of this assessment.

I would have to say that God, in all Her Glory, has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and is suffering from mood lability. It is also true that God presents as a diagnostic challenge in that She is not a being in the usual sense of the word. I cannot say at this time what is an appropriate course of treatment since God is incorporeal and we can only speak in metaphors here. God is, by definition, the supernatural creator and chief executive officer of the universe. Theologians have ascribed a variety of attributes to the many different conceptions of God (possibility of Dissociative Identity Disorder.) The most common among these include omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omni-benevolence, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence.

God has also been conceived as a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the “greatest conceivable existent”. These attributes were all supported to varying degrees by the early Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologian philosophers, including Maimonides, Augustine of Hippopotamus, and Al-Ghazali news affiliates, respectively. She is also known as the toughest Kid on the block who can play well with others at times but can suddenly turn into a Bully issuing 98 terrible curses in morbid detail when things don’t go Her way. She has not always been a very good role model for Her creations.

The only thing I can recommend is prayer as a first course of action. I don’t know what kind of prayer but medicine is not going to help Her. She seems to respond to prayer and negotiations in the Books of Moses although the results have been mixed since then. Honestly I don’t really see much of a way we can rehabilitate God. But we can keep on trying.

This is all from Ebonmusing. It is a addressed to Creationists but essentially Aish HaTorah and Chabad, Kiruv.com and all the other outreach manufacturing plants practice a form of sophisticated Creationist voodoo.

In his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe, astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote the following infamous passage:

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.” (p.19)

Though Hoyle actually intended this as an argument against abiogenesis, the creationists have since assimilated it and used it against evolution. In creationist literature, this argument has mutated into a diversity of forms: setting off an explosion in a print shop to produce a dictionary, disassembling a watch and shaking up the pieces in a box to reassemble it, and so on, building a bicycle by applying a blowtorch to a pile of bicycle parts, and so on. No matter what form the analogy takes, however, creationists have promoted it as a common-sense proof of the impossibility of evolution producing complex, highly ordered forms. There is even a creationist book titled Tornado in a Junkyard.

This essay will show that this analogy is not an accurate representation of how evolution (or, for that matter, abiogenesis) works. In fact, it is a straw man, a ridiculous caricature that bears no resemblance to what the theory actually says. However, it is first helpful to establish a few things about the credentials of its author. Fred Hoyle was an astronomer, and whatever the validity of his professional opinions on astronomy, he was not trained in biology, paleontology, genetics, or any other field having to do with evolution. He was no more qualified to make pronouncements about evolution than any layman, and indeed his comments demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the theory. Nevertheless, whatever he was, he was certainly not a creationist.

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur’an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p.14

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia…. Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today…. Darwin’s theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven.”
–Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p.15-16

We turn now to the tornado in the junkyard. This analogy says nothing about the validity of evolution, or for that matter abiogenesis, because it fails to represent them in four crucial ways.

1. It operates purely according to random chance.
2. It is an example of single-step, rather than cumulative, selection.
3. It is a saltationary jump – an end product entirely unlike the beginning product.
4. It has a target specified ahead of time.

The first point is the most important. The tornado in the junkyard is an example of an intricate, complex and highly organized form being produced by nothing more than random chance. But evolution is not chance. (See this article for more on this.) Rather, it operates according to a fixed law – the law of natural selection – which favors some assemblages over others; it preferentially selects for those adaptations which improve fitness and selects against those that do not. The tornado, by contrast, slams parts together and tears them apart with no preference whatsoever, thus completely failing to represent natural selection, the central force which drives evolution. To more accurately represent evolution, one would have to grant the tornado some power to recognize assemblages of parts which could serve as part of a 747 and prevent it from tearing them apart.

Second, the tornado analogy is an example of single-step selection – in one step, it goes from a random pile of parts to a fully assembled airliner. This is completely unlike evolution, which operates according to a process of cumulative selection – complex results that are built up gradually, in a repetitive process guided at each step by selective forces. To more accurately represent evolution, the tornado could be sent through the junkyard not once, but thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving chance assemblages of parts that could make up a jumbo jet.

Third, in relation to the point above, the tornado in the junkyard is an example of saltation – a sudden leap in which the end product is completely different from the beginning product. Evolution does not work this way; birds do not hatch out of dinosaur eggs and monkeys do not give birth to humans. Rather, species grow different over time through a process of slow change in which each new creature is only slightly different from its ancestor. Evolution forms a gradually shading continuum in which any two steps are almost identical, though the creatures at the beginning and end of the continuum may be very different indeed. If we sent a tornado through a junkyard once, we would not expect to see a complete airplane; but if we repeated the process thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving useful assemblages, we might see a jumbo jet gradually taking shape out of slowly accreting collections of parts. The idea is the same with living things. We do not see complex new creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record; rather, we see them gradually forming by a process of modification from a line of increasingly dissimilar ancestors.

Finally, the tornado analogy fails to represent evolution in one more significant way: it has a target specified ahead of time. Evolution does not. Natural selection is not a forward-looking process; it cannot select for what may become useful in the future, only what is immediately useful in the present. To more accurately represent evolution, we might add the additional stipulation that the tornado be allowed to assemble, not just a jumbo jet, but any functional piece of machinery.

A tornado racing through a junkyard hundreds of thousands of times, at each step somehow preserving rather than tearing apart functional assemblages of parts, with the aim of ultimately producing some sort of working machine, be it a 747, a station wagon or a personal computer – this is still not a very good analogy to describe evolution, but it is far better than the implausible caricature of random, single-step saltation with a predetermined target the creationists put forth. This analogy completely fails to represent evolution in every significant way.